You like to think that even in your toughest moments, your nearest and dearest will have your back. So you’ve just unveiled a national Budget that’s been pretty much panned from every possible quarter? At least you can rely on your relatives to fight your corner, buoy you up and tell you that you’ve done your best, right? Right?
Not if you’re Rachel Reeves. Today, the chancellor will surely be feeling that deep, bone-level sort of mortification that only arises when a family member does something incredibly embarrassing in public. And this sense of cringe will only be multiplied by the fact that, rather than, say, posting conspiracy theories in the local Facebook group, the relative in question is now splashed all over the papers.
Reeves’ uncle Terry Smith, a retiree from Gillingham in Kent, has broken the family omerta and instead decided to start mouthing off about her planned tax hikes in the national press. “It’s the worst Budget I’ve ever heard – and I’m 73, so I have been around for quite a few,” he told The Sun. “Rachel is my niece and is a lovely person, but [the] government is totally out of their depth.” Talk about a backhanded compliment.
Elsewhere, Uncle Terry (who is the brother of Reeves’ mum) has systematically shredded almost every one of his niece’s policies. Accompanying his political pontificating is a selfie that very much looks like it was taken seconds after the journalist asked if he “had any photos to send over to go with the piece”, with Terry sitting in front of a microwave, washing up visible in the kitchen sink in the background.
It’s an unenviable situation, and you can only imagine how awkward things will get around the Christmas table next month. But Reeves can rest assured that every family has a black sheep, that one relative who you could euphemistically call “eccentric” or “a bit of a character”, who everyone dreads being trapped in conversation with during annual get-togethers. If anything, Uncle Terry’s rogue press tour might make the chancellor, whose popularity is in the doldrums right now, seem a touch more relatable.
She’s far from the only public figure who has been left mortified by their embarrassing relative’s very public antics. Just think of how much handwringing “Uncle Gary” Goldsmith must have caused in the Middleton household (and, frankly, in Kensington Palace) over the years. The Princess of Wales’s uncle, who is the younger brother of her mum Carole, is a sentient PR nightmare.
He has the words “Nouveau Riche” tattooed across his shoulders, owns an Ibiza villa once nicknamed the “Maison de Bang Bang”, and is something of a magnet for scandal, to put it lightly. Last year, he entered the Celebrity Big Brother house alongside the likes of The X Factor’s Louis Walsh and former This Morning star Fern Britton. After using his airtime to make a few cursory digs at Kate’s sister-in-law Meghan Markle, he became the first star to be voted out – arguably making the whole affair even more embarrassing than if he’d actually been, you know, popular.
In the world of politics, cringe-inducing kinfolk are practically de rigueur. The late US president Jimmy Carter’s younger brother Billy leaned into a “redneck”, heavy-drinking persona, once urinated in front of a group of news reporters and foreign dignitaries, and loved to crop up on a national talk show. Tony Blair’s sister-in-law Lauren Booth has left the former PM and his wife Cherie red-faced on a number of occasions: she’s publicly criticised his government’s policies (especially the Iraq War), appeared on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, and made headlines when she “divorced” her husband on Facebook by changing her relationship status after an argument (classic boomer behaviour).
And you can only imagine how the mild-mannered John Major might have agonised over the public pronouncements of his older brother Terry Major-Ball (why is it always a Terry?), who was always happy to give a jolly quote to a journalist, and to chat about the family’s garden gnome business, which he inherited. Once, the story goes, he turned up at Downing Street unannounced while his sister-in-law Norma was hosting an official reception (and blithely informed the PM’s wife that he “hadn’t eaten all day”).
So Reeves can at least comfort herself with the fact that she is in good company. And if you are reading this smugly, thinking about how lucky you are not to be cursed with any nightmare relations yourself, then I have some very bad news for you: the chances are alarmingly high that the embarrassing relative is you.
